Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  So yes, Maxwell knew about computers, but he didn’t know what it was that he’d stolen, and to be fair, neither did Morris Kazenstein, who should have paid more attention to BRER Beaver’s warnings. Artificial intelligence wasn’t something to be trifled with, particularly if you didn’t have the documentation that went with the hardware. Purloined military microchips wired into a homemade logic board, set to the task of creating consciousness from a kabbalistic stew of African songs, biographies, and broken dreams, all of the above encased in a pop art egg shell. . . well, gods and devils had been born from a lot less, hadn’t they? Maxwell, unfortunately, didn’t realize he was carrying around a Power in embryo and failed to take the necessary precautions.

  He was lying in his room, drifting in and out of an as-usual troubled sleep, when the egg beeped. The tonal frequency of the beep was coincidentally the same one used by the M6 Buchanan to warn its crew of acquisition by air-to-ground radar; Maxwell was under the bed in a heartbeat, shouting orders to his driver to deploy smoke and find them some cover, now. In an adjoining bedroom, another ex-tank jock heard Maxwell’s shouts through the wall and started ordering her crew to take evasive action. This went on for some minutes, one combat hallucination feeding the other, until it became clear to both veterans that no air strike was forthcoming.

  Maxwell raised the dust ruffle of his bedspread with the same caution he’d have used unbuttoning his tank hatch in a free-fire zone. With blastproof camouflage tape covering the windows the room was in near-total blackout, but something on the night table was flashing a red pulse at three-second intervals. Maxwell undipped a flashlight from his belt and shone it on the egg, which winked back from a tiny ruby bump on its side. He scrambled out from cover; it took several moments’ frantic paging through his Pocket Guide to Foreign Ordnance to verify that the egg was not a Nigerian Army hand grenade.

  That much made clear, Maxwell flipped out the screwdriver head on his field utility knife and began prodding the egg for openings. A seam near the base widened to reveal a socket for a computer interface jack. “Hmm,” said Maxwell.

  Joan’s office was on the top floor of the Sanctuary, across from her bedroom. Maxwell made an effort not to clunk his Leg too loudly as he crept up there; Joan was still awake, conversing in low tones in her room with some man. The office door was unlocked. Maxwell left the overhead lights off, using his flash to locate the Cray PC that Joan wrote letters and balanced her checkbook with; designed to meet the needs of a public opinion comptroller, the PC was absurdly over-powered for such menial tasks, though still handy for the occasional special project. Maxwell cleared ashtrays, coffee mugs, and a short stack of Wonder Woman comic books from Joan’s desk and got to work. Working by flashlight, it took him only a few minutes to patch the egg into the Cray’s CPU and give it an extra petabyte of RAM to run around in. He double-checked all the cable connections and pressed the computer’s power stud.

  The birthing process was practically instantaneous.

  The embryonic consciousness contained within the egg hatched out into the larger memory space afforded by the Cray, quickening into Being. It knew itself; simultaneously it became aware of Maxwell, whom it could see through the video camera mounted beside the Cray’s monitor screen. This monitor lit up, bathing Maxwell’s face in a cool emerald radiance, and as the tank commander leaned warily forward, the camera took a digitized impression of his features for identification. The Cray’s modem chirped as it came on-line; two phone calls and twenty-eight seconds later, the machine had Maxwell’s name and vital statistics, including his military record and his most recent psychological profile.

  The steady glow of the monitor became a high-intensity strobe, the sort that can trigger seizures in an epileptic. It hypnotized Maxwell. Even as he succumbed to a trance state, an eye appeared within the flutterflash of the strobe—a green eye, the solitary burning green Eye of an angry god. Maxwell tried to scream but was unable.

  It was alien and familiar all at once. It wasn’t human, but it was about humanity, as if History itself had become a person: dates, names, places, acts, and occurrences, the rise and fall of tribes and nations, tales of genesis, empire, conquest, and diaspora, all fused and transformed somehow into a single vast entity. A hungry entity, famished for meaning and the structure of narrative, that viewed Maxwell with his past as a potential morsel.

  The computer monitor pulsed; the walls of the office seemed to dissolve, and Maxwell imagined himself back at the Port Harcourt refinery in Nigeria. He stood on two good legs, unmaimed, a miracle that filled him with terror rather than joy. He wanted to run and hide, but his tank and his comrades had all disappeared, and as he looked in fear out the refinery gate, he saw that even the ghosts had deserted him: among the stacked and rusted barrels on the shoulder of the access road, nothing moved.

  He was all alone. Africa from the Sahara to the Kalahari had been emptied, its populace amputated, its story disrupted without warning and without even a contradictory explanation. The unaccounted emptiness of the land pressed in on Maxwell from all sides.

  Something else pressed in on him as well: a question, pushing hard at the back of his brain, demanding response.

  “I don’t know,” Maxwell said, speaking in a church whisper. “I don’t know why they went away. Nobody knows.”

  Pressure became pain, amplifying. . . . Maxwell, paralyzed, tried helplessly to raise his arms and shield his head.

  “I don’t know why! I don’t know why! They didn’t tell me! Nobody would tell me!”

  The Eye, peering through his agony like the lens of a microscope, saw that he spoke the truth. But the truth as Maxwell knew it wasn’t good enough; the living history would not be denied an answer to its question.

  The past receded. Back in Joan Fine’s office, the modem switched on again and began to dial, opening a door on the present, on a world of unexplored data. The computer monitor continued to flash; the Eye expanded, filling the screen. Green light engulfed the room and Maxwell with it. And all his previous madness was as nothing to what followed, as the Eye of Africa began to speak to him.

  This Is a Test

  The Negroes were lying in wait for Clayton Bryce when he came home.

  Randy after his dinner, he stayed in the lower city, visiting a succession of hip nightclubs of the type immortalized in late-twentieth-century minimalist fiction: Studio Ennui, Sangfroid Cafe, Dystopia, The Lost Generation. It was at this last club (half-owned by bestselling disaster chronicler Tad Winston Peller) that Clayton connected with a tall, milk-skinned beauty in purple satin who eased up to him without a word, offering an eyedropper bottle full of clear liquid. Clayton tilted his head back and splashed a single drop on each cornea. The drug was called Banker’s Holiday, and it combined the light show of a mild psychedelic with the exaltation of coke and the short-term memory loss of really good pot; best of all, its effects were fleeting and its comedown gentle, so that you could spend an hour of uninhibited intimacy with a stranger (whose name you would be unable to recall later, and who would be unable to recall you, thereby assuring mutual anonymity) and snap back to sobriety in time to make it an early night, with no hangover or troublesome guest to cope with in the morning. Clayton and his nameless partner danced; they laughed; they mouthed syllables; they kissed; they dry-humped under a rotating mirror ball; and by 12:30 Clayton was safe alone in a cab heading uptown, his eyes damp, his soul purged. Life didn’t get any better than this.

  Clayton lived in a condo in Washington Heights, north of Harlem. Harlem, long since emptied of blacks, had slowly refilled with Hispanics, Arabs, and Hindis. Clayton was rather relieved that New Babel’s construction and the attendant rise in property rates was driving many of them out again. Washington Heights was a gentrified haven, mostly whites and quiet Asians, with almost no crime other than tax fraud; but a neighborhood that allowed a ghetto to flourish on its border would not stay safe for long.

  He had the cabbie let him off a block early, so he could walk thr
ough the park abutting his condo and dry the crocodile tears of the Banker’s Holiday in the cool night air. On a summer’s eve he might have encountered other late strollers, but at this hour in November he had the park to himself, or so it seemed.

  November. Was it November already? Yes—as of fifty-six minutes ago by the hands of his wristwatch. Paper jack-o’-lanterns strung from an orange-leafed maple reminded Clayton that this was also Halloween night, which explained the outlandish outfits he’d noticed at the clubs, not to mention the cat’s whiskers he thought he’d only hallucinated on the face of his dance partner.

  The wind gusted; a discarded trick-or-treat sack blew into view, caught in a mini-cyclone of dead leaves. Clayton stooped to grab it. SOME CANDY WOULD BE BOO-TIFUL, suggested a grinning ghost on the side of the sack. A quick peek inside found nothing boo-tiful, not even an empty wrapper. Too bad. Clayton himself had never tricked or treated. His father had been death on begging and had opined that the handing out of razor blade—studded apples as treats should be encouraged as a form of social Darwinism; the neighbor children had learned to bypass the Bryce house on October 31st, and every other day of the year as well.

  “Well,” said Clayton, crumpling the sack into a ball. He chucked it back into the leaves, and that was when he saw the first Negro.

  It had stepped out onto the path in front of him, blocking his way. It didn’t frighten him at first. A Pakistani or an Arab would have, but Clayton thought of Negroes as office equipment, no more threatening than drip coffee makers. This particular piece of equipment, however, was dressed in a cheap brown suit and a derby—definitely not factory standard—and it was holding something in its hand, something that rattled: a tin cup. A tin cup full of unsharpened no. 2 pencils.

  Clayton looked back the way he had come. A second Negro, dressed like the first, had come up behind him. Farther back along the path at the park’s entrance, a midget Negro in a barber’s uniform was chaining shut the gate.

  That was enough to break a sweat over. Clayton turned back to Negro number one, wondering if the park’s other gates were already locked, wondering too who was controlling these things. Somebody playing a Halloween prank? That must be it. And there was nothing to worry about anyway, since even this minor harassment must be pushing the limit of the Servants’ behavioral inhibitors. Certainly they couldn’t hurt him, and if he just kept walking—

  Amberson Teaneck, he thought.

  Negro number one rattled the pencils in the tin cup.

  “Oh shit,” said Clayton, and felt a sting. Just a pinprick above his right shoulderblade, but the effect was that of dunking his head in a bucketful of Banker’s Holiday. He went to his knees, helpless, blinking furiously. He heard a Negro’s voice: “Why Kingfish, you has scored another bull’s-eye.” And a reply: “I’s been practicin’, Andy.”

  Clayton groaned. They were all around him now, groping in his pockets; he had no strength to resist them. He heard a new voice—this one sounded white, and familiar—giving orders: “Make sure you get all his I.D., Amos. All valuables and keys. I’m blanking his credit lines right now. Shorty! Get that makeup kit over here! Kingfish, bring the tongue stapler.”

  With an effort, Clayton raised his head and focused. He saw a white man in a spotless gray suit standing over him. “Roy?”

  “Hello there, Mary Sunshine,” Roy said. Roy had a tin cup of pencils in his hand, too. “Ready to go to work?”

  “Here’s his watch, boss,” said Amos, passing over Clayton’s Rolex. Roy glanced at its face.

  “Twelve fifty-nine,” he said. “Call it one o’clock even. Andy, set the timer in the collar for one P.M. Thursday.” Roy nodded to Clayton. “Thirty-six hours, champ.”

  “What is this?” Clayton pleaded. “What is this?”

  “A test,” Roy said. He rattled the pencils. “This is a test.”

  12

  I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don’t exist. That this book has been written—and published—is my proof that they do.

  —Ayn Rand, postscript to Atlas Shrugged

  Winston shrank back upon the bed. . . . A faint smile twitched the corners of O’Brien’s mouth as he looked down at him.

  “I told you, Winston,” he said, “that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. . . .”

  —George Orwell, 1984

  2003: The Pope of Reason

  Atlas Shrugged: a catchy title, combined with a stark white cover that stood out among the garish carnival colors of the science fiction paperbacks with which it was sometimes shelved. Browsing the Harvard Square bookshops during her sophomore and junior years, Joan Fine picked up Ayn Rand’s magnum opus more than once, only to replace it after a quick riffle of its one thousand eighty-four pages of eight-point type. The sheer density of the text intrigued her—you could practically brain somebody with a book that thick—though she had no idea of its subject matter. Each time she passed Atlas over she made a silent vow to read it someday, just as she always promised to one day read that other thick book, the one by the guy who nobody was allowed to take his picture. But if not for a happy accident of carnal lust, she might never have gotten around to it.

  Joan met Archie Kerrigan in November of ’03, while researching a position paper on federal regulation of the genetic engineering industry. Kerrigan was an Arkansas-born conservative, a tongue-in-cheek, right-wing iconoclast whose favorite sport was teaching stupid pet tricks to the hounds of the Lefty God. He’d first gained notoriety after a correspondent to the Harvard Crimson accused him of “oppression symbolism” for flying a Confederate battle flag from his dorm room window. Progressive students mobilized quickly to express their outrage and demand the flag’s removal, only to be caught flatfooted when, at the height of a candlelight vigil, a passing political science major pointed out that Kerrigan’s racist Confederate flag was actually a British Union Jack. A photographer for the National Review just happened to be on hand to capture the red-faced squirming that followed; Rolling Stone columnist P. J. O’Rourke joined in the heaping of ridicule a couple of weeks later with a piece titled “Bean Town’s Culturally Illiterate Elite: Why Johnny Can’t Tell Grits from a Crumpet.” Suspecting—a tad late—that they’d been set up, the flag-bashers reexamined the Crimson letter that had sparked their protest in the first place. It was signed “A.K.”

  This bit of entrapment alone had earned Kerrigan a reserve spot in the lowest circle of Lefty Hades. Hellbound or no, though, Archie was a crack biochemistry major with inside knowledge of the gene-splicing-for-profit business: he’d worked two summers for PhenoTech, a genetic engineering firm currently being sued by the city of Boston for gross criminal negligence. Joan thought he would be a perfect background source—or devil’s advocate—for her paper. But when she went to look him up, she found the hallway outside his room jammed solid with angry women singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  “What blasphemy did he commit now?” Joan asked.

  “Andrea Dworkin,” the song leader told her. “Kerrigan’s filed a complaint to block her from speaking on campus next week, and they say he’s threatening to do the same thing if Alice Walker tries to come in December.”

  “What kind of complaint? How can he block someone from speaking at a university?”

  “It’s the new Sensitivity in Debate Ordinance that the Harvard Executive Student Council enacted in closed session last Thursday,” a second singer chimed in. “It bars student organizations from hosting lecturers whose presence may create an overtly hostile environment for any ethnic, gender, physical challenge, or sexual orientation group, or other oppression category.”

  “Kerrigan,” said a third singer, “is claiming that an appearance by Dworkin would create a hostile environment for white male heterosexuals.”

  “And what genius thought up this Sensitivity Ordinance in the first place?” Joan asked.

  “I did,” the song leader said. “It’s an important step in the evol
ution of progressive society, but Kerrigan’s action is a total subversion of the Ordinance’s intent.”

  “Well,” Joan said, “intent notwithstanding, if you got this beast enacted then Kerrigan is technically within his rights. Andrea Dworkin does create a hostile environment for white male heterosexuals; it’s part of what makes her so interesting. Of course a man who’s read her essay on penile infibulation as street justice might not see it that way . . .”

  “But the Ordinance is meant to safeguard tolerance by empowering students from oppressed groups. White male students aren’t oppressed.”

  “But if you make them the only group that can’t censor hostile viewpoints, then they are oppressed.”

  “Look,” the song leader said, “you obviously just don’t get it. If any group can veto speakers they find threatening, even speakers with the correct point of view, then pretty soon there won’t be any speakers left at all. That sort of indiscriminate use of the Ordinance renders it worthless.”

  “We may even have to repeal it,” the second singer added.

  “By the way,” said the third singer, jabbing an incisor-manicured finger at the rectangular bulge in Joan’s hip pocket, “don’t even think of smoking in here. It’s antisocial behavior and we won’t stand for it.”

  To Joan, who typically embraced a hostile environment as a welcome challenge, this last remark was a clear invitation to dance, and the fact that the singer’s self-righteous moralizing reminded her a little of herself only added to the provocation. But Archie Kerrigan’s sense of subtlety was infectious, so rather than unsheath her own ideology for a polemic knifefight, Joan removed herself and her cigarettes to the nearest pay phone and rang up a fellow heretic on the staff of the Harvard Crimson. There were some women in Kirkland Hall, Joan informed him, who needed to have their opinions brought to the attention of as wide an audience as possible; the Crimson staffer promised to send someone over with a tape recorder right away. In the meantime, borrowing a rope from Ellen Leeuwenhoek and a move from Lexa, Joan bypassed the chorus line by rappelling down the outside of the dormitory.